Islamic Architecture and Art in Croatia, Ottoman and Contemporary Heritage

The book presents the valuable Islamic built heritage in Croatia that has remained relatively unknown so far. It has been thoroughly researched and interpreted here both in the historical context of the Ottoman monuments from the 16th and 17th centuries and in the context of Modernism and contemporary Islamic architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. The reason why the Islamic heritage in Croatia has remained unknown until today lies in a systematic and thorough destruction of Turkish monuments in the early years of Christian reconquista in the late 17th century as well as in the ideological and religious antagonism in the past which resulted in the destruction of the remaining material traces. Croatia shows clear evidence of the westernmost expansion of the Ottoman-Islamic heritage but at the same time it is the area where Islamic visual art came into contact and sometimes even overlapped with the Western Renaissance ‘from the other side of the border’. This research into the modern and contemporary mosques in Croatia has revealed a series of unknown projects attributed to the relevant Modernist authors.